Paragon Leveling Guide 1.0.5

Don't expect anything exceptionally new here, but apparently this is actually new to some people, and even those who already done this route 1000 times might still learn a small trick or 2 to improve their efficiency. Hope you enjoy!

The video you linked is for 1.0.4. I couldn't find one for 1.0.5. Granted, the differences aren't huge, but they're existent and explained in my video.

This run is effective for all classes, with maybe a few exceptions that may need small adjustments such as archon builds which might benefit from icecrown battlements, stonefront and/or rakkis crossing.

Is the route original? Of course not, I specifically mentioned it's the route popularized by Alkaizer. If you're just watching the video for the route itself, you're missing the whole point of the video, which is to show you how to make your Alkaizer runs more efficient in 1.0.5.

Disliking a video without actually watching all of it and understanding its purpose is not very nice. It's even less nice to claim it's a copy of a video that's currently very outdated.

I generally pick up 63 weapons if they don't fall too far off my path, and slayer is a 63 weapon. At least that's the way I look at it. Since 1.0.5, most rares can roll the same stats regardless of item level with only a small difference in armor, which made the average gold value of rare items to drop off significantly (you still find as many high-value rares as before, you just have to weed through a lot more to get to them). This, of course, doesn't apply to weapons and shields. In addition, the buffs to class-specific items and jewelry in 1.0.5 makes those worth picking up, at least until the market is more saturated with items that didn't exist pre-1.0.5 (and jewelry is overall more rare making it more valuable regardless of patch changes).

That said, I'm still not really sure whether rares are actually worth picking up or not at all. It's really hard to calculate the average value of rares I get to see if they justify the time it takes to pick them up and weed through them, and it's not like it's easy to figure out how much time they consume (walk over, pick up, identify, look at stats, check price on AH and re-list until it sells, all variable times except the 1 second identify).

That said, I'm still not really sure whether rares are actually worth picking up or not at all. It's really hard to calculate the average value of rares I get to see if they justify the time it takes to pick them up and weed through them, and it's not like it's easy to figure out how much time they consume (walk over, pick up, identify, look at stats, check price on AH and re-list until it sells, all variable times except the 1 second identify).

Rare gloves are BiS for almost all classes. Picking up gloves (60-63) is almost always worth the gambling.
Just go through some profiles and you can see on which slots people use rares and on which not. Mempo, Lacuni, shields/offhands are so cheap - I don't pick any rares for these slots up anymore. A good weapon (1000+ dps, socket, maybe 1-2 other nice stats) can easily sell for 100m+ or even billions, so it's always worth it and it's easy to "scan" them after ID (socket, dps).

If you are super rich and don't care about the items at all and you don't like lottery, it's not worth it, because 99% of rares will be vendorcrap, about 1% will sell for a low price (500k-2m or so). But every once in a while you may find a precious gem, and just ask yourself if you really wanna risk overlooking trifecta gloves... ;-)

In the end just because an item is potentially BIS doesn't immediately make it worth picking up, because the time it takes to filter through all the crap ones is time you don't spend looking for more legendary items. I'm not giving a definite answer here because I don't have one, but it's definitely not obviously worth picking up just because it has potential for BIS. The only thing you need to think about is exp/hour and gold/hour, and if picking up gloves gives more gold/hour than not picking them up then you should pick them up. Of course, you'd have to play hundreds of hours to actually figure out if it's worth it or not.

As for map ping not working, I'm wondering what % of the time it doesn't work. I've personally never seen the map ping fail since the patch (not on legendary items that dropped on-screen and not on legendary items I found by accident when I backtracked similar to the example in Moldran's video), so my guess is this is actually relatively rare bug and doesn't justify changing your farming methods. Of course, to be certain, we'll need to get a better idea of the fail rate, which may take a while due to the rarity of legendary drops and the fact the bug could be caused by all kinds of things (for example, 1 possibility is for the map ping to fail only when the legendary drop is very far from you, which would explain why it's such a rare bug that doesn't justify adjustments to your tactics).

As for the "it's a carbon copy" comments: This is more of an explanation of how to farm this "old" route from the perspective of 1.0.5. I have yet to find a video that does that, so even if it's out there, it's hard enough to find that my video was worth making. If you prefer watching 2 month old videos that have a lot of outdated advice, you are free to do so. If you're just looking for which zones to clear, then yes, my video shows nothing new (as you should have expected if you actually were aware that the Alakizer route is still what you should be running). I do, however, think that my video does have some greater value than just telling you what zones to clear.

Well all I can say is look where you kill. In second video you do see the Legendary Sprit, don't here the sound though. This could be (sound wise) as was pointed out on a thread that a blue responded to, that the sound may be classified underneath a different category.

Like it's underneath music volume, but really should be underneath sound effects...for example.

Map ping is apparently bugged, as shown by Moldran, however so far it seems like the bug is rare enough to not be worth slowing down your runs in order to take the bug into account.

For most classes this path is probably the most effective, but for ranged classes you might want to test out areas like rakkis crossing, skycrown battlements and/or stonefront. They suck for melee that have to chase down every fallen, but may (or may not) work well for a ranged class. Also, a friend was complaining he loses archon as he zones out of core of arreat, so skipping that zone might be something to consider as well. If you find a better variation for your class (with enough testing to back it up) go ahead and post it!